The present invention relates to food products and to their methods of preparation. More particularly, the present invention relates to reduced sugar elastic thin sheeted food doughs and to their methods of preparation.
A variety of food products are fabricated from sheets or ribbons of sweetened food doughs. For example, a cooked cereal dough sweetened with about 15% sugar is formed into individual pieces that are then dried to form finished ready-to-eat (“RTE”) or breakfast cereals. In particular, two well known and popular RTE cereal products are known that employ such preparation intermediate steps; namely Golden Grahams® and Cinnamon Toast Crunch® brand cereals. In the commercial production of such RTE cereal products, a moist cooked cereal dough sweetened with about 15% sucrose is generally continuously extruded into the form of a continuous rope that is conveyed to a sheet forming device that forms the rope (e.g., pressed) into a continuous thin (e.g., about 0.030 inch) sheet. Thereafter, the continuous sheet is conveyed to a slitter that cuts the sheet into a number of continuous ribbons. The ribbons are then continuously conveyed to and fed into piece forming devices (e.g., cutters) to form individual pieces. The individual pieces formed are then subsequently puffed or dried to form finished dried RTE cereal pieces.
During the rope conveying operation, the sheet forming step, the ribbon forming step, and as being fed to the piece forming device, the food dough is required to have a measure of elasticity without which the ribbons can tend to tear. If torn, then the production is interrupted while the ribbons are manually re-fed into or through the conveyance devices or to the piece forming apparatus. Since rope conveyance speeds can be on the order of 30 m/min, dough tearing can quickly lead to significant production losses. Also, re-threading the production line with such a fast moving stream is also difficult. Often the entire line must be slowed and then gradually brought up to full production speed. Such production rate changes can in turn lead to loss of steady-state production conditions resulting in loss of product quality or even total loss of product itself.
The properties of the intermediate food dough must be carefully controlled to balance various physical and compositional attributes. The doughs must be soft and sufficiently pliable yet not too wet to tear. Some degree of control of the dough properties can be obtained by controlling their moisture content and, importantly herein, their sugar(s) content. Sugars not only impart sweetness to the finished products but also importantly impart at least a portion of the desired elasticity to the dough intermediate state during production. For these particular products fabricated in this manner form cooked cereal doughs, a sugar level ranging from about 10-20% have long been used.
However, present trends in consumer foods favor finished products having lower levels of sugar(s). While cooked cereal dough products having such lower sugar levels are well known in other shapes and prepared using other techniques, it would be desirable to provide consumers with familiar shapes, flavors and brands of RTE cereals with which they are familiar that are nonetheless characterized by lower sugar levels.
Regrettably, simple reduction in the sugar levels leads to reductions in the elasticity in the food dough that results in markedly increasing the difficulty in commercial manufacture. Moreover, the food art directed towards sugar replacements emphasize principally obtaining taste equivalence to sugar and provides comparatively little guidance to obtaining not only taste equivalence but also equivalence in obtaining physical property equivalency such as maintaining elasticity on intermediate processing food doughs.
U.S. Ser. No. 11/114,485 teaches that improved low sugar RTE cereal products can be provided that comprise a cereal base fabricated from a low sugar cooked cereal dough and coated with a coating including a primer layer such as an edible oil and a particular low sugar particulate sweetener coating. The present invention provides an improvement in the provision of a cereal base fabricated from a low sugar cooked cereal dough that additionally includes minor amounts of a medium chain length polysaccharide. Inclusion of the medium chain length polysaccharide improves the elasticity of the cooked cereal dough from which the cereal base is prepared for improvements in the ease of commercial production of such products.